In India this week on a short visit, Klinker made a whirlwind trip to Pune to address tech enthusiasts at a talk arranged by Pune Tech and GS Lab, a company cofounded by Shridhar Shukla, Klinker’s PhD thesis advisor back in college. Klinker told ET that his company would continue to remain at the forefront of keeping the internet free and open, and is working on various ways to do that.

“We are close to launching our browser — right now it’s called Project Maelstrom but we’ll change that name soon. This at its core, will change the way we access the internet,” said Klinker.

The browser will retrieve web content from peer-to-peer-distributed torrents instead of traditional servers. It can function as a regular browser that accesses sites ovestandard HTTP/HTTPS protocols, but the program also contains the ability to grab websites packaged as torrents and display them.

Over time, the company may look at making this an open source project. “We need this kind of radical thinking to ensure that the internet remains free, otherwise we'll have a situation where Free Basics is the norm,” he said.

He also voiced his concerns about the way things were moving at present, with the debate on net neutrality gaining prominence world over. The internet as we know it needs to be nurtured and protected for future generations. “If current trends continue, the future Internet will not be open or neutral. Apps, social networks, everything will be centralised and all about control,” said Klinker.

Over the last few years, BitTorrent has evolved from offering a P2P data transfer protocol to having a full range of products in the P2P model that would compete with what people currently use. Earlier this year it launched Bleep, an encrypted instant messaging service.